In a week, we will all be gone, and I already find myself dividing everything into the sum of its parts. Things I won’t miss: waking up at 10.55 for an 11 AM class everyday; dragging my feet through a compulsory intro bio class; the weird tension that sometimes accrues in friendships after a Big Year of Things That Have Happened.
And then, the things I will. A list so long I don’t know where to start it or where it ends — except I know that it ends here, because we are here at the end of the year and I don’t know when or how or if we will all be here again. I know that when I make my way back here in the new year, some of these things will still be here: the lawn, for one. I don’t know how any of us could articulate everything that has happened on that rectangle of grass.
Some of it has always been here, like our dorm block — only soon it will cease to be ours and will be empty again, ready to breathe in another year of love and lust and laughs and loneliness. Soon it will just be ODB again, same as it ever was.
It won’t be us spilling in and out of the Westport and Eastport doors, our presence announced by Doyle creaking out on the lawn, or falling a little bit more in or out of love — adjust, situation and month depending — each time we meet in Sallyport.
It won’t be us watching the sunrise from the lawn, projecting our thoughts onto the sycamore — which is dying, by the way, Dan Pogust told me, didn’t you hear? — or standing alone, late at night, listening to Beach House and making peace with the moon.
But it was.
I hope none of us leave, but I know that hope is futile, because some of us are going to, me included. I am not very good at staying, but I am good at being here when I am, and of taking the parts of people and places I love with me when I no longer with them, or they are no longer with me. When we leave this place — for the summer; the year; the rest of our lives — we leave parts of ourselves here. And when this time — this year — leaves us, it leaves parts of itself with us, too.
I’ve done a lot of Stuff this year — ran a weekly newspaper, watched too many sunrises, learned to like coffee and beer and also a lot more about myself than I did before this — but none of it has been more important than the people I’ve done it with. Now that we’re here at the end of it all, it feels like we often look back at the beginning — at those first nights on the lawn, that first sunrise, that first party at Rocking Chair.
It’s like we are trying to measure our growth, or chart our paths — to say ‘here is how I got blown off course,’ or ‘this is why I ended up here, why this must be the place.’ When you think about how many millions of people and places and lives there are in the world, how we nearly went to UW or King’s or anywhere that wasn’t here, it’s incredible. It’s ridiculous. It’s crazy. It’s mad we all ended up together: mad that we’re all here, when we came so close to never meeting, in so many little ways. “To you, who was almost a stranger,” said Annelyse Gelman in September. To you. To all of us.
We say “full circle” a lot, like when Piper says to me at sunrise on a Thursday smoking a cigarette on the quad that she isn’t afraid of geese anymore, like she used to be.
When two people hooked up in August, parted ways, and found each other again in their mutual friend group in May. When the same arrangement of three that wasn’t ever any good for anyone finds themselves arranged again, looking at the same tree. Same as it ever was.
The warm air outside doesn’t help, either, now that it’s May. If I stand out on the lawn with the right soundtrack, and the right view, it could be August. It isn’t. It won’t be. But if it was?
I’d do it all again, just the same.